Beauty in Opportunity
Being beautiful isn’t easy. Look at what happened the other night at the Miss California pageant when Miss Santa Cruz County upstaged the eventual winner by unfurling a banner that read, “Pageants Hurt All Women.” For more than a year she had plotted to infiltrate the contest and to present her argument that beauty pageants create unrealistic and even dangerous notions about how women should look, encouraging them to diet too strenuously and surrender to the knives of plastic surgeons.
It’s true that most Miss California contestants are dauntingly thin, improbably blonde and impossibly young, but banning such contests, as Miss Santa Cruz urges, makes no more sense than prohibiting professional basketball or football games. The males who watch those games on television may like to imagine that they can jump like Michael Jordan or throw passes like Joe Montana, but such fantasies are hardly dangerous; in fact, they usually die the first time someone twists an ankle in a pick-up game under the garage hoop. Similarly, young women may model themselves on Miss California but eventually come to realize that having a 23-inch waist means boycotting ice cream forever.
Like Michael Jordan and Joe Montana, beauty contestants these days are pros. They train like Rocky for every pageant that comes along, learn to tap dance or warble a passable tune and invest substantial time and money in the pursuit of some rhinestone crown; the casually gorgeous girls next door don’t win anymore. Just look at the current Miss California, Marlise Ricardos, who took the top prize only on her fourth attempt. For such women, who often aspire to be entertainers, winning a state crown and a chance to go on to the Miss America contest may mean the beginning of a career as a model or an actress or an anchorwoman. What’s wrong with that?
The complaints voiced by Miss Santa Cruz might have had some justification 15 or 20 years ago, when women had fewer professional opportunities, when the message that society sent to young girls was that they were valued mostly for their looks. But now women can be lawyers, doctors, firefighters and even professional athletes, if they want to be. So why not Miss California, too?